Interview with Teresa Phillips, CEO of Graspr

Graspr is a video based social learning platform and the idea is that 80% of what we know, we learn from other people. When we start a new job or when we learn something new, we don’t necessarily grab a book or take a class, we say, “Who do I know who can show me the ropes? Who do I know who’s been there and done that? I want to learn from their mistakes, so I can get smarter faster.”

That’s the premise, learning is a social experience and those two things are inseparable. We help people externalize what they know around experiential knowledge, so that we can make it more available. The vision for Graspr is to make knowledge more accessible, affordable, and to accelerate the process of learning.

That’s exactly right. Knowledge management systems today have been largely about explicit knowledge. It is about externalizing, codifying and embedding explicit knowledge so that we can, as organizations and as entities, become more efficient. Life is about relationships and business knowledge is about relationships.

At the end of the day, it’s all one and the same, in that the world is about relationships and there is no easy way to capture tacit know how. When I say tacit, it is largely experiential. Knowledge that is involved in decisions, intuition and judgment that type of knowledge is very difficult to capture. That is what Graspr hopes to do through using video and other means.

I call it accelerated positive doing, help us get smarter faster. Let’s say that I want to install a playground in my backyard. It is something that I have never done before, and my inclination is to go online and research how to do it or to go to Home Depot and ask somebody.

Instead I go to Graspr and there are several videos on how to install a playground in your backyard, and one video talks about the buy vs. build decision. They said, “I was going to do this, but I realized that there are all these prefabricated models. They will deliver to your house and set them up and it was just painless for me.” They talk about that, and then I watch another video that talks about the clearances required in the backyard, the elevation of the yard and all those things that I haven’t even considered.

I was just going to put it somewhere. I hadn’t even considered all that. So before I even start researching or talking to people after I have watched these videos and learned from other people’s perspective, my behavior is going to change. Now, I am smarter and I am going to be able to accelerate getting that playground in my backyard based on another people’s experiences.

People often say user generated content is poor quality, both in terms of technical quality as well as substance. My experience around instructional content has been very different. I spent the last six months, with a team of people looking across the Internet, to see what is out there. I have been very inspired by the creativity of people, their motivation to craft a targeted message, to prepare a quality product, to really want to help an audience learn what they know and reach out to them.

There are several source sites that we use to help us find these people. A lot of people are also syndicating their content through RSS feeds. Which is how we have acquired a great majority of our content but there are a number of places that we have used as source sites and then reached out to the producers themselves.

We segment the market into three segments. They are hobbyists, careerists and celebrities. Celebrities are people who have brand recognition or who have a commercial platform in another media like broadcast or books. Hobbyists are people who have a passion for something, but they have a day job as well. They don’t necessarily earn money from it, but they have a passion for it, they have been doing it a long time and they do want to help people.

It is innate in all of us to want to belong somewhere and to contribute and to give value and extract value from whatever community we belong to. For hobbyists, they are motivated by being recognized for what they know and helping others, but they would also love to be able to monetize what they have contributed over time.

We know two things about paid content. Number one, people will pay for content if the perceived value is high, meaning it helps them save time, save money, or has high entertainment value like iTunes.

The second thing we know is that they won’t pay for content if they can find content of a similar perceived value elsewhere for free. The second point is where you get into trouble. Online today, I might find… and a lot of producers that I’ve spoken to are in this boat.

They say, “Guys, can you start paying a little bit?” People end up just leaving. They say, “There are other people who do this. So now all of a sudden I don’t need your content. I can find other stuff with a similar perceived value elsewhere for free.”

I think most content will be media supported, however I also believe that there is an option for a subscription model for exclusive one-of-a-kind content.

This vision, is about knowledge based services. So if you look at all of the developed nations our economies are all dominated by services. In fact, the US 78% of our economy is driven by services revenue. Depending upon whose numbers you look at, 40 to 60% of our service workers, excluding government, of course, are knowledge based workers.

So again we’re back to knowledge, and relationships, and intuition, and judgment, and all those things. Where you have knowledge and you have people you have implicit, tacit knowledge. And so if you look at a world that’s dominated by services and you say the people who provide these services are knowledge providers, like our doctors, our nutritionists, our teachers, our tutors, all these folks, their income potential… our dance instructors… their income potential is capped based on time and space, the number of people they can reach in a day and their geographic reach. The people they can serve in a day and their geographic reach.

So think about a world where we can help externalize and package that know-how and make it more affordable and accessible to people.

When my son was born, he was born premature and as you might imagine I spent numerous hours online trying to connect with people who had similar experiences. I wanted to learn from them about taking care of children who were born severely premature.

Finding people was difficult, as this was before the advent of social networks. However, when we did connect it was extremely powerful and comforting.

Within the first two years of my son’s life we had therapists come in four days a week to teach us as parents how to observe our son’s behavior and intervene appropriately to promote proper development. It wasn’t rocket science. They were some very basic things, but had we not learned how to do those things, we would not have recognized the signs, and who knows where our son would be today.

He just turned four and he’s doing very well, and I really credit both the parents that we were able to talk to and make connections with and those knowledge based service providers who taught us what our roles should be as really helping him to be where he is today.

That experience changed me, and this is the genesis of Graspr. I had this drive and conviction that, everybody in this world should be able to access knowledge when they need it, not just people who can afford it or people who live near Stanford. We were blessed to be so close to Stanford and have great care, but there are parents out there every day going through the same thing that I went through, and they can’t access this type of knowledge. So that’s really what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create a platform and a vehicle for people who have know how to help them externalize and package that know how so we can make it more affordable and accessible to people who need it.

We have a vision for the company, but we have to meet people where they are. In essence you have to go where the content is. The most activity is around Food and Drink, there’s a lot of people talking and sharing everything about food.

It is an intersection of people who are contributing, but also and areas that lend itself very well to video.

We did think about going into three interdependent closely related categories and I picked sports, recreation and fitness; those three and we started there. You have to start somewhere. That was the initially plan and we also had a lot more depth to what we were doing around communities of practice.

As we got closer to launching and did more homework we found was that once you get the sports and fitness and it leads over into exercise and health and wellness and then aging. It just naturally floated into other things and we as humans don’t fit nicely in one box, we all belong to multiple communities, have multiple interests and learning is largely serendipitous. It just as much about discovery and connection with people as it is about problem solving or deliberate learning. Learning is very incidental.

The risk would have been they typecast us and say, “Oh, they’re just about a sports site” or, “They’re just sports and fitness.” Then they would never come back. Now we’ve got a great breadth of content across a number of categories and they actually can meet other people that they can act with around sports for instance, which is this is real life works. This is, “I’m learning about golf with somebody and now that person I learned also just painting or is also into arts or whatever else.” And then I’m like, “Really? Well, that’s something I’ve always wanted to learn to learn, too.” It’s people, it’s continent and it’s all free flowing.

It’s hard to say, because I have so many. There is so much great content created by incredible people that it is very difficult to pick one.

If you’ve done something before then it’s more familiar and you can typically take short cuts and you have higher intuition. It’s a lot about skill and we all have certain skills. I’m obviously better at some things than I am others based on my backgrounds and experiences and skills.

There’s this whole level of maturity about where you are, how things are, being comfortable in the decisions that you’re making, being confident that you can react to change quickly, being poised and I think that has helped me more than anything. I haven’t started a company before and so there are a lot of very tactical things that I just haven’t done and so I’ve had to learn how to do them.

While working at the larger firms I always had large teams to work with. Now, I’m doing their jobs simply because we are a small team.

When you’re a leader and you have a hundred people working for you, you’re in a different role. Your role is to make sure that the people have what they need to do their job, whether it’s the resources and the training. You’re making sure that people are aligned and they’re mobilized in the right direction and everything is in sync.

Now I’m actually doing it all. In leadership positions I had the luxury of being a perfectionist, but now that we are a small team I don’t have such a luxury.

We are building a business and not a widget. That’s partially why it’s taking so long is because I’ve done a lot due diligence on the fundamentals of the market and we are building something that is sustainable, scalable and it has a real foundation.

We are staying focused on the customer and making sure that we listen and evolve iteratively.